


War song at a funeral

by Kirjava3456airbender



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Child Death, Death, Drabble, Grief/Mourning, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Not Beta Read, Only one of these characters ia ctually there, The other two are only mentioned - Freeform, We Die Like Men, i'm not sure how graphic the violence actually is but the warning's there just to be safe, this is just a couple hundred words of hurting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-08
Updated: 2020-07-08
Packaged: 2021-03-04 19:47:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 827
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25141867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kirjava3456airbender/pseuds/Kirjava3456airbender
Summary: He watches as they lower his body into the ground, and he burns.
Relationships: Aang/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 16
Kudos: 83





	War song at a funeral

**Author's Note:**

> So here's a shitty little drabble, largely inspired by the peeps over at the Zukaang discord and their headcanons about Zukaang dynamics. Please let me know if you see any mistakes with the tense!

He’s only twenty years old when he watches the sun priests perform the funerary rites around his lover’s corpse.

This is pain.  
Like nothing he has ever felt before.  
It burns.  
In his chest, his veins, every inch of skin to the tip of his fingers burns.

It’s more than pain, even.

It’s hate.

He stands there, watching as they lower the body into the ground and he doesn’t cry. There’s no casket, only a white sheet as he goes back into nature. He remembers, conversations whispered into each other’s ears at night. (“When I die, I want you to plant trees over my body, or flowers maybe, hundreds of them.”) He does as he was asked, kneels on the dirt and plants as many flowers as he can, until the ground is nothing but a sea of white.

It looks like it’s been snowing, but inside, he _burns_.

For a few months, he manages to keep the flames inside himself, he crafts a safe with his own ribs and flesh but the fire doesn’t snuff out, instead it waits. And on the outside, he wears indifference like armor, pretends that the love of his life isn't six feet under his feet, pretends he doesn’t want to rip out every single flower and tear them to pieces, like he doesn’t want to dig into the earth until his nails tear and his fingers break and breathe air back into his lungs.

Instead he imagines he’s constantly facing Koh and he doesn’t move a muscle. It unsettles his friends, who slowly learn to abandon him, as they should have from the beginning. Perhaps surprisingly, Sokka is the last one to leave (“C’mon buddy, I know you’re in there somewhere, come back to us, yeah?”) But he does leave eventually, like the rest of them. It doesn’t matter to him, he can feel a thin film of loneliness on his bones but it doesn’t bother him.

Loneliness feels like gasoline.

Much later, when he’s knee deep in ash, he’ll ask himself why it took him so long to snap. Maybe it’s because the fire took it’s time to consume him, so he wouldn’t notice and try and put it out. Slowly, it ate up his arteries, his lungs, his heart, until he became a being purely made of heat and oxygen.

And fuel. Fuel in his hatred for anyone who didn’t stop his death, for the fire nation loyalists who killed him, the water tribesmen who celebrated his death, the earth kingdom upper class who sent gifts wrapped in indifferent platitudes and didn’t bother attending the funeral. Even for the air nomads, who could have changed history if they had been there but instead they were killed and isn’t death such a selfish thing?

A younger version of himself would have tried to reason with himself, would have gently explained that no one except the assassins were to blame, would have welcomed him into his arms and shushed and let him cry and then told him with a wisdom that he no longer possesses that the culprits have been punished and there’s no one else to blame. But he only has this version of himself, a version who _aches_ in bitterness, a version that despises the world and the spirits for their indifference.

And so when the fire can no longer be contained, he lets it out.

He burns the palace first, with the staff and royals inside it, and their screams are jarring and awful but he doesn’t stop. It’s an arduous process, to burn the earth to the ground, but he does it with a smile on his face. One town after the next, men who uselessly sacrifice themselves for their families, women who cry at his feet and beg for their children’s lives, children who stare at him with pure primal fear and tears in their eyes.

He melts the flesh of their faces and then he steps on their charred bones until they snap.

They try to stop him, his old friends and allies face him in duels and battles but he bests every single one of them. He no longer has any compassion to give and when they hesitate in their love for him, he murders them in cold blood. For a second, he contemplates keeping a token to remember them by, but then he realizes that everything they had owned and loved is nothing but cinder.

Everything is cinder.

He burns until the earth is charred and the sky is black with ash and he can’t see anything beyond the smoke and he’s all alone on the earth. He burns until he’s all alone in the world and every single spirit has abandoned him. There is no wind, no birds chirping and even the crackling of flames that had followed him for so long has died down. There is no sun.

And then Aang falls onto his knees, pictures Zuko’s smile and weeps.


End file.
